Y-so-Serious?

Went to 8 hours of "how to use a hospital computer charting" training. Tried to tell them I usually pick up computer charting in a matter of...well...minutes. The only thing that kept me sane was the fact that I was sitting next to a co-worker who had seen The Dark Knight with me Saturday night and we randomly quoted the movie in our medical "record".

So my patient, "Dodge Curveball", stated during his make-believe swallow evaluation, "why so serious?" when asked what his therapy goals were. Hehehehahahaheheehhe. Right before he pulled a knife on me. That would be a code "green" for all of you out there, or a code-whatever-the-hospital-calls-it. For some reason they didn't show us how to fill out incident reports today-- that would have been a good thing to play with while the respiratory therapists learned how to set vent norms and the Speech therapists were twiddling our electronic thumbs for 90 minutes.

There is a great hospital scene in The Dark Knight. I won't spoil it. But there is a moment when I think I was able to identify every healthcare worker in the theater-- we all snorted our drinks at the same time. That, and I was evaluating a certain injured character's ability to speak and swallow safely. Personally, I'm impressed with the function when acknowledging the amount of damage done to the oral-musculature. Enough. I don't want to spoil a good scene and/or reveal what level of nerd I am.

That's all gobbly-gook unless you've seen it-- and possibly still gobbly-gook if you are not an SLP.

That being said, sitting through a class on computer charting is lame. The Dark Knight- so not lame. It was a fun, fast paced movie that is certainly one of the better I've seen. Even if I watched part of it through my fingers. See Lately'sreview for a more intense description.

4 more hours of computer class tomorrow, followed by 3 days of "training exercises" and then the hospital goes live and all the paper charting I've just now gotten a hang of will change over to computer. Luckily, I type faster than I write.

Go see Batman. And don't be so serious.

Introducing....Roanoke, VA

The Roanoke star was built in 1949 and for awhile was the largest in the country. They change the colors according to national events- there's a nice write up in wikipedia.



The view from the star is quite nice. Look, Roanoke.




July 4th weekend I went across the street from the hospital and watched some fireworks. A 29 minute firework display! With awesome fireworks! Very nice- best I've seen since the July 4th in Washington D.C.!




For those of you wondering what a portable washer machine looks like. As you can tell from the picture, it rolls over to the sink and connects to the kitchen sink faucet. So far my clothes smell pretty good, but I'm checking them very carefully. Other than having the temperature controlled at the faucet, it works just like a regular washer. When I'm done, I roll it back over the the steel structure that supports the dryer and shove it into place.



The first weekend I went exploring I stumbled on a car show reminiscent of Moab, UT. I'm wondering what the MPG are on this monster.

On a personal note, Roanoke is nice so far. I've already agreed to stay an extra month beyond what I was initially contracted. The unit is nice- I miss MBSSs, but I'll have opportunity for those again after this assignment. It's a small unit with an excellent team- I haven't seen a great deal of friction and that's always nice. The church I'm attending, Our Lady of Nazareth, reminds me of my childhood parish in WV. People really greet each other, and we pray aloud out intentions, and we hold hands during the Our Father. I've been bike riding, and have 2 possible hiking buddies. We're planning our first hike next week after work.

All is well! More later. Take care!

The Booklist

Thanks to Smitty, I've now been distracted from getting myself breakfast, taking a shower, and figuring out which pictures to post. Instead, I feel an intense desire to post a booklist. Here goes:

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (I put a * instead, cause I'm lazy and was bolding in groups)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 *Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 *Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 *Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 *Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 *The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 ***The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 *One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 *Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 *Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 *Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I'm at 56- but to be truthful most of the books were read in highschool as part of the summer reading program. I did have a tendency to demonstrate difficulty picking only 3 books off my summer reading list and instead read most of the books and just did the "homework" on the ones I thought would be easiest to get done! Very few of those books were read outside of school. I used to be a reader! Still do, but not as voracious as when I was a child. Too many other distractions.